


A Gross Oversimplification

by stephanericher



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Alternate Universe - Baseball, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-27
Updated: 2018-01-27
Packaged: 2019-03-09 23:37:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13492209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stephanericher/pseuds/stephanericher
Summary: “I was thinking about pitching again,” says Daiki, wrapping his arm around Shintarou before trying to figure out the blankets.“When are you not?” says Shintarou.





	A Gross Oversimplification

**Author's Note:**

> this isn't really about baseball but i thought about writing this tangential to talking about baseball, so??

“Thank you for your time,” says the interviewer, and the flat tone of the call disconnecting sounds.

Daiki sighs, stretching, lifting the phone above his head and cracking his back. It’s not noisy enough for Shintarou to wake up from the other room with the door closed, but it’s enough to make the cat saunter in, probably assuming there’s something more in it for her than Daiki talking into his phone in a low voice. Daiki looks back at her, and her green eyes stare sharply at him. A little bit like Shintarou, which Daiki loves to point out (though Shintarou’s long past the grudging tolerance for cats he’d once had, or at least for this particular cat, he still prickles at the comparison). She butts her head against his ankle and he reaches down to scratch her behind the ears, a few seconds later and she shakes him off. He’s not interesting enough right now to hold her attention.

The light above flickers; Daiki runs his hand through his hair. Shit. He’s too awake to get back to sleep; it must mean he’s getting old. Old enough, anyway; he feels the miles on his bones, the miles that make the sum of pitches he’s thrown (sixty feet, six inches, ninety or a hundred a game at least, thirty-five starts a year, plus high school, plus whatever the winter leagues and spring training and fooling around count for—shit, math was never his best subject) and lines he’s traveled from Chicago to Detroit to New York to Baltimore to Miami to Houston and back, and there again, to the west coast, back to Japan and back here. The words he’s said in press conferences and in interviews like these written down and stretched out on a string, how far would that go? How many nights have been interrupted with the time difference? He’s never sought to quantify this much, but maybe that’s Shintarou rubbing off on him.

It's not like it’s a burden being him. He’d log all that travel and time and work all over again, five, ten times, to play this much baseball. Not to play more, though, maybe—only recently his answer to that would have been different, but maybe that’s part of getting older. It’s the realization that baseball is fucking great, the source and the tie that binds everyone and everything important in his life together, but it’s not everything. If he could chop it up into bits and pieces, he’d trade a start here or there for more time with Shintarou, more time to just be together in their home.

It would feel different just to lean on the counter and talk on the phone at ass o’clock in the morning without Shintarou there in the next room, still asleep. Even without thinking too much about the alarm he’d set for himself, grumpy Shintarou minus glasses glaring at him as he’d left, pulling the covers all around him in an effort to stay warm (and thinking about how he should crawl right back in, like, five minutes ago)—just knowing he’s there, and the kind of baseline mood being with Shintarou puts him in. It’s a lot, on its own (God, they hadn’t known how lucky they’d had it back in high school, two years of living together and playing together every damn day) but just because things are good doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t want more. They both deserve the best, even if the best is some kind of American idiom about cakes. But if he could be with Shintarou, and play with him, and talk about him? Saying it like that is simpler than the whole thing is.

Real life is complicated, and its dilemmas are not easily answered with a set of canned phrases in three languages he can fall back on about the team, about fair play (betting is bad; drugs are bad; trying his good), about how happy he is (even if it’s true, compressing it into a statement like that makes it trite). Or maybe it’s not supposed to be, but everything around it makes it complicated, but isn’t that part of real life, too? (Okay, he needs more sleep; he hasn’t made this kind of pretentious-sounding philosophical argument in his own head since before he hit legal drinking age.) It’s like pitching, maybe; everyone makes it complicated but it’s really just muscle memory and knowing from the batter’s stance, where to throw it and how to throw it. (That’s a gross oversimplification, Shintarou’s voice says in Daiki’s head, and with that Daiki stuffs his phone in his pocket and heads out of the kitchen.)

Shintarou’s back asleep, facing away, and Daiki pulls the cover away. He tries to be gentle, but Shintarou stirs, anyway.

“Go back to sleep,” says Daiki.

Shintarou sighs and rolls over, releasing the covers from underneath him.

“I was thinking about pitching again,” says Daiki, wrapping his arm around Shintarou before trying to figure out the blankets.

“When are you not?” says Shintarou, half through a yawn.

“I was thinking you’d say I was oversimplifying.”

“You probably were,” says Shintarou, smile thick in his voice like the leather on a new glove.

Daiki kisses his neck, and he feels Shintarou huff out a surprised breath.

“Momo…”

“It’s so early,” says Shintarou. “It’s the middle of the winter—”

“A month to pitchers and catchers,” says Daiki. “We can sleep all day.”

“We can sleep right now,” says Shintarou, turning away again.

Daiki stays awake a little longer; Shintarou’s breathing evens out after about five minutes but the moon is throwing patterns on the wall and his feet are still cold. Maybe tomorrow they can go out and rent a batting cage or something, argue over who hits what where and how many points that counts for in their endless one-on-one competition. Or maybe they can do nothing, or just wing it and figure it out as they go. That’s what they’ve been doing so far, anyway, and they’ve managed to make it work, keep playing baseball and stay together, holding up the weight of being themselves.


End file.
